swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'.

shortmail.com

Email is on my mind, first the Email Charter, now Shortmail: Shortmail is a length-limited simple email service meant to make your email experience effective and efficient. All Shortmail messages must be less than 500 characters. Limiting messages to 500 characters puts the burden of conciseness onto senders. Blaise Pascal famously said, “If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.” Because the messages are so short, Shortmail is able to present them in a more conversational layout.

I am excited about this idea, but not necessarily about having to use someone elses service/platform. I wish it would work like a ‘layer that sits ontop of my own domain’. But nevertheless, this is most definitely a step in the right direction and I’ll give it a try.

Tina, it’s one of these Yet Another Clever Ideas (YACL™) that would have been nice to have around if only the collective we could find a way to convince the collective we to behave in this—or any other for that matter—prescribed all-beneficent manner. Length of individual messages is, indeed, one factor working against them, but there are many more grave ones, like semantical coherence to begin with, that stand no hope of ever being implemented. So why bother with another artificial layer on propriety on top of barely managed entropy that is the email of today?

[The best thing I can say about shortmail’s concept is that it is tied to one’s twitter handle, thus preventing anyone else from claiming that account-ID for herself – I PRESUME it does that.]